Geoffrey Robertson

Geoffrey Robertson QC is founder and head of Doughty Street Chambers and has argued many landmark human rights cases in British and Commonwealth Courts and the European Court of Human Rights. He has served as first President of the UN's Special Court for Sierra Leone and is one of the three "distinguished jurists" on the United Nations internal justice council. He has argued hundreds of death sentence appeals, prosecuted Hastings Banda, defended Salman Rushdie, Mike Tyson and Julian Assange and acted for Human Rights Watch in the proceedings against General Pinochet. He is a Master of the Middle Temple and author of Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice; The Case of the Pope; Mullahs without Mercy: Human Rights and Nuclear Weapons; and The Tyrannicide Brief. In 2011 he was awarded the New York Bar Association prize for achievement in international law and affairs.

No other jury verdict has had such a profound social impact as the acquittal of Penguin Books in the Lady Chatterley trial. Fifty years on, Geoffrey Robertson QC looks at how it changed Britain's cultural landscape